I made a mistake: > And, yes, L + middle dot + L is indeed used: in a smallish number of > catalan words, even if the barcelonian [normative] pronunciation > doesn't distinguish between "L" and "L�L", though it doubles a number > of other consonants.
This should be the barcelonian [non-normative] pronunciation, i.e., trivial-level catalan as spoken in Barcelona streets, not formal-level catalan as used by mostely Barcelona-based entities, like Regional Government, Universities or radio and television. As for the nature of the middle dot, short of a specific code point attributed to LATIN LETTER CATALAN MIDDLE DOT, there should be something ensuring that this character can be treaded as a letter for all things refering to word delimitation (smart select, line break, word count, etc.). I imagine that with 9 million native speakers catalan may appear as a weak lobby to push to such a change in the standard, but note that while other uses of (non-letter) middle dot are marginal and scarcely content- bearing, catalan middle dot is central and essencial to quality textual content representation and encoding -- which AFAIK Unicode is all about. (In the two paragraphs above I used "letter" in a typographical meaning, not as a linguist would, of course.) -- ____. Ant�nio MARTINS-Tuv�lkin | ()| <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> |####| R. Laureano de Oliveira, 64 r/c esq. | PT-1885-050 MOSCAVIDE (LRS) N�o me invejo de quem tem | +351 917 511 549 carros, parelhas e montes | http://www.tuvalkin.web.pt/bandeira/ s� me invejo de quem bebe | http://pagina.de/bandeiras/ a �gua em todas as fontes |
